Dishonored - Why you shouldn't buy it @ VG247

It’s too short.
No it’s not, you prat, and I spent quite a long time saying so. I know what you want from games, friend: you want a wee popup saying “mission successful” and a breakdown of how amazing you are at pressing buttons on your plastic input device of choice.
For years you have been trained to believe that this is how things are done – games give you a task; you complete them in as direct a fashion as possible; an achievement unlocks; this repeats for 12 or so hours and it feels like $60 well spent. If it lasts for less than 12 hours you write an angry forum post.
That’s fine, dude, and I wish you well in your mole-like ingestion of breast-fed entertainment. But if you can give up the speed run mentality for a couple of minutes, you’re going to be more than compensated for your precious, precious time (which has been assigned a dollar value of game cover price divided by minimum hours spent on one aspect of the game).
Even once you’ve tried out both extremes of the chaos metre, there’s loads to find in terms of side quests, branching storylines, and lore – let alone the potential for mechanical exploration; Arkane’s beautiful semi-sandbox has only been out a few days and already people are doing marvellous things with it, suggesting a YouTube phenomenon in the making.

Except the combat is actually quite developed, so that doesn't really hold true. It's inevitable an action approach will be faster than a stealth approach - same as Deus Ex, so length of play isn't a good measure of equivalency.

The first line of the insert already put me off - calling readers a 'prat' because they do not agree with you is arrogant and infantile. Whatever this person's opinion is, I no longer have desire to read it.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
Except the combat is actually quite developed, so that doesn't really hold true. It's inevitable an action approach will be faster than a stealth approach - same as Deus Ex, so length of play isn't a good measure of equivalency.

And untrue for some MGS, SH… For those games, avoiding combat makes them shorter.

my take is that the writer is taking a stab at that a lot of games are more "streamlined" know, thus making a population of gamers prone to "rush through" it.
Not lifting their gaze at the surroundings or exploring anything except next quest mark and waypoint. I wouldn´t go so far to call them prats though.. ;-)

Last edited by Crilloan; October 13th, 2012 at 18:35.
Reason: writing with two tired kids in your lap and focusing while listening to My Little Pony is rather difficult…